The 400 Blows was made in 1959 by Francois Truffaut and is regarded as one of the most defining films in the French New Wave. Its about this rebel rouser named Antoine who is portrayed as a menace to society by not only his teachers but parents who are required to unconditionally love their children in the face of most atrocities.
...breaks your heart
Now, what they can't plainly see is he's just a kid and that he's got the tendencies of most kids. Its semi-autobiographical, harking back to the childhood of Truffaut, and reveals the foul play and mistreatment of the juvenile adolescents in France during that era. Its got a myriad of elements that most of us could identify with as teenagers because it symbolizes the ultimate rite-of-passage. Antoine lives in this apartment house whose growth had been stunted long ago with his mom and stepfather who are barely home. The mother is having an affair with some guy from work, the step-father has no real close ties to the boy, approaching him only as an obligation to the woman he married, and they will eventually leave his destiny up to that of social services. His name has been smeared by the education system who've labeled him as a warped punk and liar, which is only natural after claiming his perfectly healthy mother dead. He skips school, goes to the movies, steals typewriters, sleeps in printing factories, burns up his room with a Balzac shrine, betrays his parental figures trust, and
Truffaut (left) and Leaud (right), his alter-ego
overall just gives the whole mess hell. All of this is hereby portrayed through a very nitty-gritty aesthetic similar to that of Italian neorealism, which absolutely defies the conventional film making at that time. It has a sort of natural beauty that couldn't be achieved by Hollywood cinema, radiating a sober truth through its stripped-down guerrilla style and making it just the thing movies needed. It was all 27 flavors, tickling the palate and turning the stomach with a bittersweet rebellion. Its just gorgeous...and especially the final scene that leaves you in this haze of ambiguity. Its just a zoom in on a freeze frame of Antoine gazing straight into the camera after running away from your atypical house of detention and reaching the sea. The sea he had never seen before...and then its over. Its just a simple, uncompounded outro without being a needle in a haystack because its open-ended to the point where you just sit back and say," Ah...the kids got it made," and frankly, that's all you need. You don't have to see what happens after or it wouldn't have the same effect. Structure had been eliminated and replaced with the anatomy of spontaneity and originality. It was a refreshing frame of mind and something that has altered film forever.
THE 400 BLOWS
The 400 Blows was made in 1959 by Francois Truffaut and is regarded as one of the most defining films in the French New Wave. Its about this rebel rouser named Antoine who is portrayed as a menace to society by not only his teachers but parents who are required to unconditionally love their children in the face of most atrocities.